Terry Pratchett Biography

The L-Space Web: Just who is Terry Pratchett?

Terry Pratchett

A biography by Colin Smythe

This biography created by Colin for use on L-Space

Sir Terry Pratchett: born 28 April 1948, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. Major
source of education: Beaconsfield Public Library (though school must have been of
some little help). After passing his 11-plus in 1959, he attended High Wycombe
Technical High School rather than the local grammar because he felt 'woodwork
would be more fun than Latin'. At this time he had no real vision of what he
wanted to do with his life, and remembers himself as a 'nondescript
student'. But he had an interest in radio, he and his father belonging to the
Chiltern Amateur Radio Club in the early 1960s, their joint handle being
'Home-brew R1155'. It was from this that Terry's interest in computers
grew - when a transistor cost a week's pocket money and you built things like
a radio round one.

When Terry was thirteen, his short story 'The Hades Business' was
published in the school magazine Technical Cygnet, and two years later,
commercially, in Science Fantasy. With the proceeds he bought his first
typewriter. Other short stories - 'Solution', 'The Picture' and
maybe others, yet undiscovered - also appeared in the Cygnet. Terry was
in line for a bright future. Having earned five O-levels and started A-level
courses in Art, History and English, he decided after the first year to try
journalism, and when a job opportunity came up on the Bucks Free Press,
he talked things over with his parents, and left school in 1965. While with the
Press he still read avidly, took the two-year National Council for the
Training of Journalists proficiency course (and came top in the country in its
exams) and passed an A level in English, both while on day release.

Terry married Lyn Purves at the Congregational Church in Gerrards Cross in
October 1968, by which time he had interviewed Peter Bander van Duren, my fellow
director of our publishing company Colin Smythe Limited, for the Bucks Free
Press about a book he had edited on education in the coming decade,
Looking forward to the Seventies. At this time Terry mentioned to him
that he had written a book called The Carpet People and asked whether we would consider it
for publication? So Peter passed it to me. Yes. It was a delight, and it was
obvious that here was an author we had to publish. We got Terry
to produce about thirty illustrations and published it in 1971, with a launch
party in the carpet department of Heal's store in Tottenham Court Road,
London. Peter and I both wrote a blurb and as each wouldn't give way as to
which was to be used, we used both. The Carpet People received few reviews, but those few
were ecstatic, with it being described as being 'of quite extra-ordinary
quality' (Teacher's World) and 'a new dimension in
imagination ... the prose is beautiful' (The Irish Times). What the
reviews would have been like had reviewers seen the illustrations in colour -
Terry hand-coloured the illustrations in about half a dozen copies - can only be
guessed. (These coloured illustrations have been on display on the L-Space site
for a few years, and many of them will be used in an illustrated edition of the
second version of the book to be published by Random House Children's Books in
2009).

While at the Bucks Free Press, as well as his other duties Terry took
on responsibility for writing the stories for the children's column, the first
of which featured the world and characters that later became The Carpet People. During his
time there he wrote sixty short stories for it, never missing an episode for over
250 issues. He left the Press for the Western Daily Press on 28
September 1970, but he returned to the Press in 1972 as a sub-editor. On
3 September 1973 he joined the Bath Evening Chronicle. (At this time he
also produced a series of cartoons describing the goings-on at the
government's fictional paranormal research establishment, 'Warlock
Hall' which Peter commissioned for our monthly journal Psychic
Researcher, published by us, that he edited.) Terry and Lyn's daughter
Rhianna was born in 1976, and many of his books have been dedicated to her.
The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) were both written on dark winter
evenings, when it wasn't possible to work in the garden. In 1980 Terry was
appointed a publicity officer for the Central Electricity Generating Board (now
PowerGen) with responsibility for three nuclear power stations ('What leak? --
Oh, that leak' and in a phone call from his boss at 6.30am
'Have you heard the news? No? Well, it's not as bad as it
sounds….').

In 1981, he spoke about Strata, 'Fundamental to the story is a theme
hinted at in my previous SF book The Dark Side of the Sun, that nothing in the universe is
"natural" in the strict sense of the term; everything, from planets to
stars, is a relic of previous races and civilisations. Life is not an afterthought
on the universal scheme of things, but an integral part of it which was in there
shaping its development from the beginning. It might be true, for all I know.&$39;
And he added, 'I am also working on another 'discworld' theme, since I
don't think I've exhausted all the possibilities in one book!' Indeed
he had not, as the future was to show. He was working there when we published the
first of the Discworld books, The Colour of Magic, in 1983. Given that it consisted of four
connected tales, I hesitate to call it a novel, and our contract actually defines
it as a collection of short stories. Terry's paperback publisher at the time
was New English Library, whom we had licensed to publish The Dark Side of the Sun and
Strata (both with cover illustrations by Tim White) but they failed to
market Strata adequately - the fact they'd just been taken over by
Hodder & Stoughton at the time did not help matters as Hodder's sales
representatives had heard of few of the NEL authors they were now selling, with
the possible exception of Robert Heinlein. (NEL published Strata in 1982,
but when they remaindered their stock in 1985, I bought about 300 copies and so
kept the book in print for a few more years.)

In 1983 I was able to interest Diane Pearson at Corgi in The Colour of Magic, and as
soon as I knew that Corgi would be interested rights I got NEL to forego their
option clause - 'As Strata sold so badly, you don't want to publish
Terry's next book, do you?' 'No, we don't.' 'Oh dear. Well
never mind. I expect I'll be able to find another paperback publisher in due
course,' sort of exchange - and Diane in turn convinced Corgi to buy the
paperback rights. Corgi succeeded in getting BBC Radio 4 'Woman's
Hour' to broadcast it as a six-part serial, immediately after which NEL rang
to ask whether the paperback rights were still free: of course, they were too
late. Corgi's publication of the first Discworld novel in late 1985 was the
turning point in Terry's writing career. 'Woman's Hour' later
broadcast his third novel, Equal Rites. At the time, I was told that no other books
had generated so much reaction from their listeners.

The Light Fantastic was published in 1986, by which time it had become obvious to Terry
and myself that if he was to maximise his potential, then he had to move to a
major hardcover publishing house, as our small company was unable to cope with the
demands of bestsellers, and that this should be done while we were still friends.
Victor Gollancz's SF list was very well known and respected, and Terry
indicated that he'd like to be published by that company. I suggested to a
friend at Gollancz, David Burnett, that they should consider taking Terry on, and
although they had never published fantasy before, only traditional SF, once the
editor of their SF list Malcolm Edwards was convinced of their saleability, we
struck a co-publishing deal for three titles, Equal Rites, Mort and Sourcery, and
these appeared under Gollancz's imprint 'in association with Colin
Smythe'. With Terry's increased popularity, however, it became obvious
that this arrangement would cause a conflict of loyalties for me, so it was
terminated and I became his literary agent. Until the appearance of The Last Continent, all
Discworld novels were published in hardcover by Gollancz, while Corgi published
all the paperback editions (except Eric).

In September 1987, soon after he had finished writing Mort, Terry decided
that he could afford to devote himself to full-time writing, rather than merely
doing so in his spare time after work: he thought he might suffer a drop in income
for a while but that it would pick up in due course - and anyway, he enjoyed
writing more than fielding questions from the Press about malfunctioning nuclear
reactors, so he resigned his position with the CEGB (about which he says he could
write a book if he thought anyone would believe him). His sales - and income -
picked up very much more quickly than he expected, and his next Gollancz contract
was for six books_AB_FNREF(1), with much larger advances. Gollancz also signed up
FaustEric, a novella illustrated by Josh Kirby, that was first
published simultaneously in large-format hardcover and paperback editions in
August 1990, and the following year as a small A-format paperback without
illustrations. It has since been published in other countries in both illustrated
and unillustrated versions.

Terry's collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens was published in May
1990. There have been film options and rumour of options ever since, with Terry
Gilliam's name often associated with it, but it has yet to escape from
Development Hell. However, late in 2007 the Costa Book Awards carried out a survey
of the most re-read books, and Good Omens came fifteenth, ahead of The Bible and
The Hitchhiker's Guide. (It is finally available as an unabridged
audiobook, issued in the UK by Isis and read by Stephen Briggs, while the American
edition, published by HarperAudio, is read by Neil's preferred choice, Martin
Jarvis.) Also in 1990, Clarecraft Designs, a company in Suffolk, founded by
Bernard Pearson, was licensed to produce a series of models of Discworld
characters, and before it closed in 2005 it had produced over 200 figurines, many
of which were also produced as pewter miniatures. In October 2008, the Polish
company, Micro-Art Studios, started producing Discworld miniatures under licence,
based on Paul Kidby's illustrations.

As Discworld grew in Terry's imagination, so did the complexity of the city
of Ankh-Morpork, and Stephen Briggs, with Terry's input, set about creating a
street map of the city mostly based on the descriptions of the activities of
Samuel Vimes and the City Watch. This was painted by Stephen Player, and with an
accompanying booklet was published as The Streets of Ankh-Morpork by Corgi in November 1993.
Following its success - it reached no. 4 in the bestseller non-fiction list, if I
remember correctly - Terry and Stephen created The Discworld Mapp, published by Corgi in
1995, again painted by Stephen Player.

Sales continued to improve, Soul Music (published by Corgi in May 1995) spent an
unbroken run of four weeks in the no.1 position on the paperback bestseller list,
The first Discworld computer game (if we exclude the ill-fated Piranha's very
basic 1986 Colour of Magic, created by Delta-4 for
Amstrad, Commodore and Spectrum computers), produced by TWG/Perfect 10, was
released by Sony's games company Psygnosis on St Patrick's Day 1995. In
1996 both Maskerade and Interesting Times featured in the top ten hardcover and paperback
lists of titles most in demand prior to Christmas.

In 1997 I read that Reaper Man (1991) was Britain's eighth fastest-selling
novel for the previous five years: a remarkable achievement for any book at that
time, let alone a so-called 'genre' novel. (Of course, the Harry Potter
phenomenon was soon to change that market out of all recognition, and we should
now be surprised at nothing.)

Of his books for young readers - all published by Doubleday - Truckers (1989),
the first volume of what is known in the USA as the Bromeliad Trilogy, was a
landmark in that it was the first children's book to appear in the British
adult paperback fiction best-seller lists. It was followed by Diggers, and Wings
(both 1990), the revised version of The Carpet People (1992), and all three Johnny Maxwell
books, Only You Can Save Mankind (1992), Johnny and the Dead (1993), which had been the first Terry had
started work on, but put aside to write Only You Can Save Mankind as a result of the Gulf War,
and Johnny and the Bomb (1996). Film rights in the Truckers2 series were acquired by
Dreamworks Animation in 2001, but only now in 2010 are things appearing to move on
that front, with Danny Boyle at the directorial helm, following his success with
Slumdog Millionaire, and while Frank Cottrell Boyce was at one time
writing a script, the most recent information I have (3 December 2010) would
indicate that Craig Fernandez has written one, entitled Everything Must
Go.

In 1993 Corgi started issuing abridged versions of the Discworld novels as
audio-books read by Tony Robinson, and two years later the unabridged versions
started to be released by Isis Publishing. Of the first twenty-three, twenty-one
were read by Nigel Planer and two by Celia Imrie, and since the twenty-fourth, all
have been read by Stephen Briggs, who has also read the Truckers trilogy,
The Dark Side of the Sun, Strata and Good Omens for Isis. Chivers (now part of the BBC)
have issued the Johnny Maxwell novels and The Carpet People, all read by Richard Mitchley.
In the States, Terry's most recent novels have been also read by Stephen
Briggs for release by Harper Audio. Almost all are available for download from audible.com and from audible.co.uk.

Playtexts by Stephen Briggs, of Mort, Wyrd Sisters, and Johnny and the Dead (this by
Oxford University Press), were also published in 1996, as was Gollancz's
publication of Feet of Clay, described on the jacket as a 'chilling tale of
poisoning and pottery', featuring, among others, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes,
Captain Carrot and the City Watch. The Pratchett Portfolio of Paul
Kidby's illustrations of Discworld denizens, with accompanying text by Terry,
was published in September and November saw the publication of Hogfather, the
paperback edition of Maskerade, and the release by Psygnosis of Perfect
Entertainment's game, Discworld II:
Missing, Presumed.... As to sales, Hogfather and Maskerade shared the honours by
being top of the hardcover and paperback lists respectively two weeks running. It
was the third time Terry had had books in the no.1 positions in both lists
simultaneously, and as far as I know, no other author had succeeded in doing this
even once up to that time. And Hogfather held the no.1 position in the hardcover
fiction list for five weeks. The Times stated that by their calculations,
he was probably the highest earning author of 1996 in Britain, and certainly had
the greatest sales.

Jingo, in which Ankh-Morpork and Klatch go to war over an island in the
Circle Sea that tends to rise and sink, and the Patrician and the City Watch have
to settle matters, was published in 1997, as was Discworld's Unseen
University Diary for 1998 (the first of eight co-written with Stephen Briggs
and illustrated by Paul Kidby), and Cosgrove Hall's cartoon series Wyrd Sisters
was shown on Channel 4, with Astrion releasing it and Soul Music on video. (For some
reason, possibly the arrival of a new head of department, although also
commissioned by Channel 4, Soul Music was only transmitted in the middle of the
night on 27 December 1999, over two years after its release on video). Corgi have
published the illustrated film-scripts of both. Stephen Briggs' stage
adaptations of Guards! Guards! and Men At Arms were also published that year.

Terry's twenty-second Discworld novel (and first hardcover to be published
by Transworld's Doubleday imprint) - The Last Continent (definitely not about
Australia, but just vaguely Australian) - was published at the beginning of May
1998 and was twelve weeks in the no.1 position in the hardcover fiction
best-seller list in Britain. The next, Carpe Jugulum, in which the witches battle
vampires for the Kingdom of Lancre, was published on 5 November and it and the
paperback edition of Jingo (published on the same day) jointly held the no.1
positions in the hardcover and paperback fiction lists for four weeks running.

Also in May 1998, Corgi published A Tourist Guide to Lancre by Terry, and Stephen Briggs,
illustrated by Paul Kidby, and Terry's and Paul's Death's Domain was published
in May 1999. The third computer game, called Discworld Noir, was also
released about that time, as were a double volume containing The Colour of Magic and
The Light Fantastic, entitled The First Discworld Novels, published by Colin Smythe
Ltd. At the same time, the paperback edition of The Last Continent came out and stayed for
something like twelve weeks in the no.1 position on the Sunday Times
paperback bestseller fiction list. In August Steve Jackson Games issued the GURPS Discworld game with
contributions by Terry (though citing Terry and Phil Masters as joint authors) and
illustrated by Paul Kidby, which was followed in 2001 by GURPS Discworld Also,
illustrated by Sean Murray.

In 2003 the BBC Big Read showed Terry as having as many titles in the top 100
best-loved books - five - as Charles Dickens. (Initially Terry was told he had
seven in the list, this being the figure the BBC gave him they interviewed him for
the programme, thus beating Dickens by two books. Subsequently the number was
reduced - for some reason not yet divulged - to five, so there was a dead-heat for
first place, and all those questions in the interview that referred to his seven
titles therefore had to be deleted.) The second 100, as listed in The Big Read
Book of Books contained a further ten of Terry's novels.

Terry has also written a number of short stories, a number of which have
Discworld themes. The longest, 'The Sea and Little Fishes' was published
in October 1998 (in Legends, a collection edited by Robert Silverberg).
He finds that short stories involve him in almost as much work as a full-scale
book, and if he is already writing a novel - which is almost all the time - he
finds it very difficult to stop and change tracks, as it were, and write a short
piece, so there are fewer of that genre around than one might expect. A
non-Discworld story, 'Once and Future', appeared in a collection in the
USA in 1995, but it has not been and will not be published in Britain in the
foreseeable future. A collection of short stories, Once More, With Footnotes was published in the
US to coincide with the 2004 Worldcon, when Terry was its Guest of Honor. A
similar collection has yet to appear in the UK, but I (and Pratchett fandom) live
in hopes.

When he took up his position with the Western Daily Press in 1970
Terry and Lyn moved to a cottage in Rowberrow in Somerset, and in 1993 when he
found he could not enlarge the cottage further, the family moved to what Terry has
described as 'a Domesday manorette' south west of Salisbury. Alert fans
will have seen pictures of this on the TV interview at the time Soul Music was
published, and in Salisbury Newspapers' July 2001 issue of Limited
Edition, under the title 'Planet Pratchett'. Just before the 1993
move, Terry slipped outside the front door of the cottage, hit his head, and
mildly concussed himself, blotting out his memory of the previous few hours.
Unfortunately, he had received a cheque from me that morning for a rather large
sum of money. He knows he put it somewhere safe, but still has no
recollection where, and it has yet to turn up - the replacement was safely banked,
without problem.

Terry's work for the Orang-Utan Foundation is common knowledge. In 1995 he
went out to Borneo with a film crew to see orang-utans in their native habitat,
and among the praise that 'Terry Pratchett's Jungle Quest' received
was a comment by Sir Alec Guinness in his diary (published the following year),
that it was - apart from one other programme - 'the most impressive thing
I've seen on the box this year'). Terry has also done a year's stint
as Chairman of the Society of Authors (1994-95) was elected a permanent member of
its Council, and was chairman of the panel of judges for the 1997
Rhône-Poulenc Prizes for Science Books (later known as the Aventis Prizes,
and since 2006 the Royal Society Prizes, as they are now owned and managed by the
Society).

His fiftieth birthday at the end of April 1998 was celebrated by a party hosted
by Transworld Publishers. While news of a celebration could not be kept from him,
I think that its size - fifty guests to a dinner at the Ivy Restaurant in Soho,
with various original presents - took him completely by surprise. But what hit the
headlines that year was his appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British
Empire in the Queen's 1998 Birthday Honours List 'for services to
literature'. The initial soundings-out from Downing Street came as such a
surprise to him that initially he suspected that it must be an elaborate hoax.
However, accompanied by his family, he went to Buckingham Palace on 26 November
1998 to receive the decoration from the Prince of Wales.

The Fifth Elephant (the working title of which had been Uberwald Nights) was
published in November 1999, as was Nanny Ogg's Cook Book (written in
collaboration with Stephen Briggs, with recipes by Tina Hannan, and illustrated by
Paul Kidby).

In July 1999 he received an honorary Doctorate of Literature (D.Litt.) from the
University of Warwick (and in turn granted doctorates of the Unseen University to
Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, co-authors with him of The Science of Discworld, which had been
published the previous month). This was the first of a string of honorary
doctorates, from the University of Portsmouth (2001), the University of Bath
(2003), and Bristol University (2004).

Terry's twenty-fifth Discworld novel, The Truth, was published in November
2000. This novel had been started some years previously but he put it aside as for
some time he could not see how the plot would develop. An idea of how long ago he
started planning it is given by the original working title - Interesting
Times - which got used for a different novel, published in 1994.3The Truth is about Ankh-Morpork's first newspaper, so Terry was able to make
use of some his experiences from his own reporting days. It was the first
Discworld novel to have been published simultaneously in Britain and America.

It was followed in May 2001 by Thief of Time, featuring Susan, History Monks, the
Auditors, the Five Horsemen (including the one who left before they became famous)
and even chocolate-covered coffee beans... In August 2001 Gollancz published the
2002 Discworld calendar, entirely made up of pictures by Josh Kirby. They also
published the 2002 Diary - The Thieves' Guild Diary. The Last Hero,
featuring Cohen the Barbarian, the Silver Horde, and a cast of ?thousands,
amazingly illustrated by Paul Kidby, was published in October 2001. This was
followed a couple of weeks later by The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, which won the prestigious
Carnegie Medal for the best children's book of the year. Before the repeat
presentation before the Librarians invited to the event, Terry was able to palm
the gold medal and replace it with a chocolate-centred gold 'coin' of the
same size, which he proceeded to eat, to the amazement of his audience.

Sadly, Josh Kirby died in November 2001, aged seventy-two. He had illustrated
the covers of Terry's books since Corgi first started publishing him in 1985
and it must be true to say that outside America - and for many there - the first
Discworld book almost every fan acquired would have had a Kirby picture on its
cover, and in many European countries Kirby covers are still
essential.4

Terry's second collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld II - The Globe,
was published by Ebury Press in May 2002, followed in November by Night Watch, the
first Discworld novel without a Josh Kirby cover on it (if you don't count our
first edition of The Colour of Magic, which had been published before Josh was selected by
Corgi to do the covers). Instead it had a magnificent Paul Kidby painting based on
Rembrandt's 'The Nightwatch'.

In Autumn 2002 (the year Terry's sales accounted for 4.3% of the UK's
general retail market for hardback fiction), Gollancz published The (Reformed)
Vampyre's Diary and a Calendar with work by a number of artists,
both for 2003, a year in which Doubleday published Monstrous Regiment, The Discworld Companion (with
Stephen Briggs) and The Wee Free Men, a novel for younger readers, set on Discworld,
featuring the Nac Mac Feegle and a young girl discovering she has witch-powers,
Tiffany Aching. This won the 2004 W.H.Smith People's Choice Book Award in the
Teen Choice Category. It also won the Locus Award for the Best Young
Adult Novel of 2003. Terry's second novel featuring Tiffany Aching,
A Hat Full Of Sky, which brought Granny Weatherwax in as a major player, was published
at the end of April 2004.

Going Postal, the thirty-third novel in the Discworld sequence, was published in
October 2004 (with an ever-enlarged selection of stamps emanating from the Cunning
Artificer, Bernard Pearson, some of which are reproduced on the book's
end-papers), and became the UK's biggest selling hardback novel for 2004. It
was followed by The Art of Discworld, in which Terry's text
accompanies Paul Kidby's illustrations. There were only calendars and no
diaries for 2004 or 2005 as Terry had not been able to decide on suitable themes
for Stephen Briggs and Paul to work on.

The 21st anniversary of the November 1983 publication of the first
Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic (which has sold well over a million copies in the
Corgi edition alone) took place in 2004, and to mark this Transworld (in
association with Colin Smythe Ltd) issued an anniversary hardcover edition of it
with a photographic black and gold cover (with 1,000 signed, numbered and
slip-cased copies), as well as the next six novels in paperback with similar cover
designs. (By 2009, all the Discworld novels will also be available in this
alternative format.)

The third Science of Discworld book with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen,
called The Science of Discworld III - Darwin's Watch, was published in May 2005, and his next Discworld novel,
Thud!, appeared at the beginning of October, and apart from its usual
appearance at the top of the British bestsellers list, and according to
Bookscan it broke all records for one week's sales of an adult hardback
fiction novel since they began keeping UK book sales data. Meanwhile, the American
edition published by HarperCollins reached the no. 4 position in the New York
Times' bestseller list - the first time in the top ten there.

At the same time Doubleday and HarperCollins issued a short picture book,
Where's My Cow? illustrated by Melvyn Grant, which shows Sam Vimes reading it to his
young son, as described in Thud!, but adding his 'improvements'. This
book, the 'Children's Winner of the Ankh-Morpork Librarians'
Award', was written by an Ankh-Morpork author, one Terry Pratchett, whose
portrait even hangs in a corner of Young Sam's nursery. Unfortunately, no
biographical details of this author appear in it, and he has not yet featured in
any of Terry's other Discworld books.

A two-part four-hour dramatized mini-series adaptation of Hogfather (by Mob
Films) for transmission on Sky1 was transmitted in December 2006, and the DVD is
now available. Filmed as live-action with CGI, with the late Ian Richardson as the
voice of Death, Sir David Jason as Albert, Marc Warren as Teatime and Michelle
Dockery as Susan. Filming the snow scenes took place in February 2006 in Scotland
and main filming was completed at the Three Mile Studios in London, with the CGI
being created by the Moving Picture Company. In April 2007 it won a BAFTA
Interactivity Award, the citation being to Aidan Conway, Giles Pooley, Rod Brown,
Ian Sharples (Mob Film Company/Sky One Networked Media). Sky invested more in this
than in any previous production they'd commissioned, and their confidence was
more than justified by the viewing figures of 2.8 million for this £6 million
project, making it the highest rated multi-channel commission ever (to that time),
beating BBC3's October 2006 figures for Torchwood.

While all this was making headlines, Terry finished his next Moist von Lipwig
novel, Making Money, published in September 2007, which became the best selling adult
fiction novel published that year in the UK, and he finished writing his next
young adult novel, Nation, set on a small island in the almost Pacific in
the aftermath of a Krakatoa-like eruption. In 2007, too, he had been working with
Jacqueline Simpson, eminent folklorist, and former Secretary of the Folklore
Society, on The Folklore of Discworld.

Sir David Jason, Tim Curry, Sean Astin and Christopher Lee (as the voice of
Death) are four of the major names in The Colour of Magic, the Mob's second Discworld
mini-series for Sky1 and RHI Entertainment, which combined the first two Discworld
novels under the title of the first book, and was transmitted in Britain in two
parts, on Easter Sunday and Monday 2008 and later in the year in North America and
Australia. It was mostly filmed in and around Pinewood Studios in south
Buckinghamshire (near where I live), with forays to Horsley Towers in Surrey,
Cardiff docks, Snowdonia (north Wales) and Niagara Falls. Mob's next foray
into Discworld will be Going Postal, with an intended transmission date of Spring
2010.

While on tour in America in summer 2007, Terry told audiences at the National
Book Festival in Washington DC (during which Terry breakfasted at the White House
and dined at the Library of Congress with the other featured authors) and in New
York, that he'd had a stroke, but the symptoms had been misdiagnosed, and were
of a far worse illness, posterior cortical atrophy, a rare variant of
Alzheimer's disease, which was diagnosed in December. As he knew he would have
to inform his publishers, he thought it wise to make a public announcement (first
releasing the news at
www.pjsmprints.com/news/embuggerance.html):
he knew the news
would leak out anyway, and he preferred that people should have the full facts
immediately. This got considerable press coverage, but it did not prevent him from
completing Nation, and by March 2008 he'd decided that he would hit back
at the disease and help the search for a cure - or at least help find methods to
control it - by donating a million dollars to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.
It took him some time to be prescribed the best drug presently available to combat
the symptoms, Aricept, but he does have to pay for it as he is considered too
young to be given it without charge by the National Health Service.

2008 has marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the first
Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, as well as Terry's sixtieth birthday and his and
Lyn's fortieth wedding anniversary, all of which were celebrated in different
ways, public and private. On 14 June he held a five hour signing outside
Foyle's bookshop on London's South Bank to mark the publication of the
Making Money paperback, fortunately in fine weather - and it gave those in the queue
an excellent chance to see the Royal Air Force's fly-past as it headed for
Buckingham Palace at the end of the Trooping of the Colour, it being the
Queen's official birthday. The queue was also entertained by songs from the
musical of Only You Can Save Mankind, composed by Leighton James House, lyrics by Shaun McKenna,
which would be seen on stage in 2010 (an earlier version of which was seen at the
2004 Edinburgh Fringe).

To mark his sixtieth birthday, Terry's daughter Rhianna arranged an
open-air concert by Steeleye Span (one of Terry's favourite groups) in their
home village in Wiltshire. This was followed in August by the 2008 Discworld
Convention, the sixth in Britain. The Folklore of Discworld was published
on 11 September with the much-acclaimed non-Discworld young adult novel,
Nation, almost entirely set on a not quite Pacific island, were officially
published on the same day, with a launch party held at the headquarters of The
Royal Society (which has a 'walk-on' part in the book), in London, while
the Illustrated Wee Free Men (illustrated by Stephen Player) appeared in
early October.

Terry has now written forty-eight books (of which thirty-six are Discworld
novels) and co-authored 5 a further fifty. Between them they have sold
over 60 million copies in thirty-seven languages, which I calculate would be a
pile of books over 1,000 miles high, stretching further than Land's End in
Cornwall to the furthest tip of the Shetland Islands off the north coast of
Scotland - or from New Orleans to Chicago, and then some.

Apart from these events, Terry has been interviewed about his books and his
thoughts on Alzheimer's Disease and the government's attitude to treating
the sufferers, pointing out that up to December 2008 Alzheimer's research has
only been getting 3% of the funding that cancer research gets from the government,
as well as highlighting the inadequate treatment available to sufferers, on
television, radio and in the press. His vociferous support seems to be having a
positive effect on the government, but supportive words from ex-PM Gordon Brown
were not supported by action. As Rebecca Wood, the Chief Executive of the
Alzheimer's Research Trust said: 'Terry promised to "scream and
harangue" about dementia research. He did much more than that. He became a
voice for the 850,000 people in the UK who live with dementia but cannot scream
and harangue so loudly. Dementia research is still vastly underfunded, but this is
changing thanks to Terry's incredible work.' But so much more needs to be
done.

Terry has also been appearing at various festivals, including those in
Cheltenham and Edinburgh. He was busy before he discovered he had early onset
Alzheimer's, but now even more so, as he appears to have become the public
face of the disease: his particular variant leaves the cognitive parts of his mind
virtually untouched, as anyone who has recently seen or heard him on TV or radio
or elsewhere can vouch. He even spoke at the Tory Party's annual conference in
September this year, and received a standing ovation.6 The two hour
documentary by IWC Media for the BBC, 'Living with Alzheimer's' was
shown on BBC2 in February 2009 as part of BBC Headroom, the BBC's two-year
mental health and wellbeing initiative, and received two BAFTA awards. As Terry
was in Ennistymon for the first Irish Discworld Convention at the time the awards
were to be announced, his PA Rob Wilkins made the exhausting journey from the West
of Ireland to Glasgow, accepted Terry's award then returned to Ennistymon,
from where he almost immediately had to drive the hire-car back to Dublin.

This article inevitably focuses on activities in the English-speaking world
north of the Equator, and much could and should be written about his popularity in
other countries and other languages - stage adaptations have been performed on six
continents (including Antarctica), and his popularity south of the Equator is
considerable. Australia, for example, accounts for about 5% of Transworld's
sales of Terry's books, and both Thud! and Making Money were no.1 in the
Australian hardback fiction bestsellers' list on publication.

On 9 September 2008 he received a fifth honorary degree, from Buckinghamshire
New University (based in High Wycombe, where he'd worked for the Bucks
Free Press in the 1960s), and where he was also the guest speaker at the
ceremony, and on 12 December he received an honorary doctorate of literature
(LittD) from my alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin University, the first
he has been given by a university that was founded_AB_FNREF(7) before the
20th century.

The year climaxed with the announcement that Terry had been included in the
2009 New Year's Honours List, being appointed a Knight Bachelor, 'for
services to literature', with the press handout adding that it was 'in
recognition of the huge impact his work has had across all ages and strata of
society and across the world'. Amongst the mass of worldwide press reportage,
the Independent (London) devoted half its leading article 'Honours
earned and omitted' to Terry, ending with the words 'In a period of
personal adversity, Mr Pratchett has shown genuine courage. The knighthood of this
modest man is an example of what our honours system should be about - and the best
reason of all not to scrap it.'

In January 2009 the Royal National Theatre announced that it was going to stage
an adaptation of Nation by Mark Ravenhill in the Olivier Theatre, over
Christmas 2009. The previews started on 11 November, with the press night on the
24th, and it was shown on NT Live around the world on 30 January 2010.
Corgi had published the playtext in time for the preview nights, but the play
changed prior to the first night, so the Corgi text differs from the final
version, which is to be published by Pearson as an educational text.

Terry completed Unseen Academicals some months behind schedule, mainly because of its
length (135,000 words - none of his other novels having been more than about
110,000 words) and the complexity of its 'threads' and time-line that had
to be checked carefully to ensure everything flowed smoothly without internal
contradiction. Editing his work now is not nearly as easy for him as it used to be
as he now dictates, either to Rob Wilkins or through a voice recognition program.
The Mob's production with Sky of Going Postal (in which Terry has a cameo role as
a postman attempting to deliver a letter to the late, unlamented Reacher Gilt) was
filmed in Hungary during the very hot summer of 2009, and was transmitted on Sky
at the end of May 2010.

Other events during 2009 were the award of further honorary degrees, from
Bradford and Winchester, his attendance at the First North American and First
Irish Discworld Conventions, his creation of a sword made from iron ore he
collected on Salisbury Plain (with the addition of a little bit of
'thunderbolt iron' from the Sikhote Alin meteorite to give it that special
extra-terrestrial 'something'), and a cogently-argued article, published
in the Mail on Sunday in August, on the right of a terminally-ill person
to be able to choose when to die without being viewed as a potential
criminal._AB_REF(8) Terry developed this theme when, at the end of 2009 he was
invited by the BBC to give the extremely prestigious 2010 Richard Dimbleby
Lecture, which he called 'Shaking Hands with Death'. It was broadcast on
1st February 2010, with Terry reading the introductory words and then
handing over to Tony Robinson as his 'stunt Pratchett' to read the major
part of the lecture. It was about a subject whose 'time had come' to be
aired, and I thought it remarkable how many people agreed with his viewpoint,
Christians and non-Christians alike. For Terry, writing is an essential for a
happy life, and he has said that when he can no longer create, then would be his
decision-time. But there seems no need for him to worry about that
decision for years to come - as readers of Unseen Academicals and I Shall Wear Midnight will recognise,
when they finish these immensely enjoyable, beautifully crafted, works. He has
finished his next work: another Commander Vimes/City Watch novel, called
Snuff (with a working title of 'Vimes on Holiday') which will be
published in October 2011. I had originally thought it was to be the third Moist
von Lipwig novel, Raising Taxes - and oh how relevant is that title in
Britain now! - but Terry moved away from that, and I think his next book will be a
young adult novel set in the 19th century London of the alternate world
of Nation.

Terry is now an adjunct Professor at Trinity College, Dublin University, and in
November 2010 went to Dublin to give his inaugural lecture and masterclasses, as
he did so again in March 2011.

In March too, the Royal Mail issued a series of stamps called 'Magical
Realms', which include portraits of Rincewind and Nanny Ogg (painted by Howard
Swindell) as well as characters from the worlds of Harry Potter, Narnia and
Arthurian myth.

Work is progressing on a number of TV productions, Unseen Academicals being the next to
be produced by Mob.

During the Summer of 2010 the National Portrait Gallery put on an exhibition of
mystery portraits in its collection at Montacute House, Somerset and invited
various people to create lives for those portrayed. Terry called the character in
'his' portrait Sir Joshua Easement, a late Elizabethan adventurer whose
career to a certain extent depended on his total absence of a sense of smell. His
biography and those of six other sitters (by authors including John Banville,
Joanna Trollope appear in a paperback being published by the NPG in February 2011,
Imagined Lives: Mystery Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery
c.1520-1640.

2Truckers was originally produced by Cosgrove Hall in 1992 as a
much-acclaimed stop-motion animation series for its owners Thames TV, which had
also optioned Diggers and Wings, but as the option was about to be exercised in
1994, Thames lost its TV broadcasting franchise, and Cosgrove Hall's workforce was
radically reduced and its outlook was, for a time, bleak.

3 Another possible title had been Printer's Devil - the
term used in the past in Britain for an apprentice to the printing trade. It had
started because a 16th century printer blamed an excessive number of
typographical errors in a religious service book not on bad proof-reading but on
the Devil.

4 Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery held a major exhibition of
Josh's work from 15 June to 30 September 2007. Its website now has a detailed
biography together with reproductions of examples of all aspects of his work,
together with a podcast of a lecture tour round the exhibition by Dr Paul
O'Keeffe. http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/joshkirby/.
There had previously been exhibitions of his work in the Hammer Gallery in Berlin
in 1986, the Durham Art Gallery (8 April to 8 May 1995), and the Williamson Art
Gallery, Birkenhead (13 July to 15 September 1996). See also www.joshkirbyart.com.

5 By 'co-authored', I mean books that he has collaborated on
writing, and dramatisations, graphic novels, etc, that have been created from his
novels.